The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet
In Giulia Caminito’s mesmerizing novel The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet, an Italian girl navigates private treacheries and injustices.
Gaia grows up in poverty, learning to be tough in a house whose concrete courtyard is her only respite. Her father uses a wheelchair, and her mother, Antonia, is tenacious. When her mother lobbies to secure their family public housing in a better part of Rome, Gaia is resentful. Later, with her father and brothers, she moves to a lakeside town that’s treated with elegiac tenderness. There, as a teenager, she faces bullying. After one of her friends commits suicide, her simmering emotions tilt toward rebellion.
Antonia often steals the spotlight. Despite Gaia’s prickliness, she expresses veiled admiration for her mother’s refusal to stop fighting for her loved ones. Vibrant sketches of Antonia’s sacrifices mix with mother-daughter clashes and glimpses of Antonia’s own rough upbringing. Indeed, Antonia is both a balm and a linchpin in Gaia’s fractured household.
Marked by lucid treatments of vulnerable girls’ friendships, loves, and the pendulum swings among them, this coming-of-age novel fills in the gaps between people’s expectations and teenage desires for independence. One of Gaia’s classmates, for instance, feigns pride about her sexual exploits and engages in dangerous online exchanges. Gaia herself earns good grades to appease her mother, but she still keeps plenty of secrets about her activities. She chooses her rivals and companions based on convenience or the protection they offer. She is angry when she is excluded, engages in self-condemnation, and has complicated reckonings with her own story. In time, Gaia matures because of her losses, learning to embrace her once-stifling surroundings.
A work of aching realism, this volatile coming-of-age novel is about the precariousness of growing up.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
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